Running Osmo-FL2K on VMWare Workstation Pro
Thank you to Sajjad Golchin Poor for writing in and letting us know about his success with getting Osmo-FL2K to run in WMWare Workstation Pro. Osmo-FL2K is a driver that enables very cheap VGA dongles to work as a SDR transmitter. Previously in our initial first tests with the FL2K-SDR we discovered that it wouldn't connect to a Virtual Box virtual machine, but theorized that it might work in the commercial (non-free) version of VMWare as that has known working USB3.0 support. Regarding his tests in VMWare, Sajjad writes:
...I started working with Virtualbox but as you said the USB 3.0 drivers have some problems and cannot disconnect dongle from the host and attach back to the guest.
So I went for VMWare Workstation Pro 14 and after booting the GNU radio live image and attaching the dongle and installing the drivers it worked perfectly at transmitting WBFM on the virtual machine. For permanent use of dongle I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 16.04 latest version and it is working flawlessly right now on the VMWare.
Something that I realized during my test was that the maximum achievable sample rate in VMWare environment is a little bit lower (by Max. 10Ms/s) than what was expected but I guess it is ok for most applications. (it may be because of VMWare USB 3.0 drivers.)
Another thing that I came up with was that some sample buffers may drop during the delivering process to FL2K and it can ruin the whole transmission process. for example, when I was transmitting WBFM after a few minutes it stopped transmitting without any warning/error in the console and the machine thought that it is delivering the samples right to the device. It happened to me both in the VMWare environment and GNU radio live bootable so it might be a software issue.
Sajjad also that he's able to achieve sample rates of at least 145 MS/s in VMWare, but that maximum rate that it locks at always seems to vary between 145 - 157 MS/s
We have been wondering if anyone else has been successful in getting an FL2K dongle to run smoothly in a virtual environment? If you have please post in the comments.